Earlier this month, Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviewed analytical philosopher Galen Strawson at Closer to Truth (April 9, 2025 9:14 min).

The title of the broadcast, “What is Consciousness: Data or Information?,” makes it sound far more nerdy than it is — as you will see. Strawson is a very interesting figure for our times and more on that below. First some excerpts:

Kuhn: Galen, you have very strong views about [0:03] the nature of consciousness and — as a panpsychist — that consciousness is part of the fundamental nature of real physicalism, which is one of your arguments and a strong conclusion. I want to try to roll that back to the beginning. What are the relevant things about the world that you need to begin to structure your concept consciousness?

As Kuhn says, Strawson is a panpsychist (the view that consciousness is real and all nature or at least all living things have it). But apparently he wasn’t always one. In 2018, he explained to science writer Robert Wright how he argued his way into that position:

So, what is the electron made of? Well, in some sense, it’s just energy. I think of it as a sort of “bzzzz”—you know, just a little buzzing thing of energy.

And … what is the intrinsic nature of that, above the things we know it does, the effect it has on other things? It’s consciousness. That’s the suggestion.

The point is simply that it’s a very elegant and parsimonious theory, because we haven’t postulated any non-experiential stuff at all. And again, the only thing we know absolutely for certain is that there is consciousness. So why are we going out there and postulating that there’s something utterly non-conscious, and then creating for ourselves a huge theoretical problem about how we get consciousness out of the non-conscious?

“How a materialist philosopher argued his way to panpsychism” (The original post at NonZero (June 28, 2020 is no longer available. but Strawson’s “What is it like to be an electron?”approach is echoed elsewhere.)

As a panpsychist, he responds to philosophers like Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) and Keith Frankish, who attempt to deny or minimize the existence of consciousness. He defends its existence by inferring that everything is conscious to some degree. That in turn enables him to endorse the existence of consciousness by making it part of the known material universe. So he does not need to espouse dualism.

Panpsychism has been growing in acceptance. The currently popular Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness is said to have roots in panpsychism. That fact became controversial recently but the theory has apparently survived the crisis, which is in itself significant.

So what does Galen Strawson need to structure his concept of consciousness?

When Kuhn asked him, his reply was spirited:

Strawson: Oh, I think all I [0:48] need to do is to be a human being having conscious experience. This relates to my objection to the idea that there’s a so-called “mystery of consciousness.” My reply to that is: No. I know exactly what consciousness is. There is no mystery at all. I not only know what the human, as it were, form or flavor of consciousness is, I also have a completely general conception of what it is.

And I think I can illustrate that by thinking about — think about young children when they listen to a story. You tell them about some alien creatures or some magical creatures who have experiences that they can’t even imagine — they get that immediately.

And what that shows is they too already at a young age have a completely general conception of what consciousness is. So I don’t think I have to do any more theoretical work to say what I mean by consciousness…

[When asked what jazz was] Louis Armstrong said, if you got to ask, you ain’t never going to know. And this is what I exactly what I would say to someone who said, “What is consciousness?” You know what it is from your own case. The having is the knowing, okay?

Well, in one sense, that’s the point, isn’t it? An eye doctor may know far more about the human eye than the rest of us do. But all of us who are sighted know what it is like to see. People offer different accounts of how sight comes to exist but that is a different matter.

Perhaps because of that, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor is a bit more concrete in his approach:

Why we can’t find consciousness in the brain

I define consciousness in a simple way: it is the means by which we have experience. By “experience” I mean the spectrum of the mental powers we use—moving, perceiving, remembering, emoting, imagining, understanding, judging, willing, etc. By “means” I mean that consciousness is the instrument that enables experience. But it is not something that can be known in itself.

Consciousness is somewhat like seeing through contact lenses. Nearsighted people can see clearly through them, but we don’t see the lenses themselves. In the same way, consciousness is a power of our soul that is always invisible to us, because it is the instrument, not the object, of our knowledge. It is the means by which we experience, not what we experience. Thus we can’t “find” it in the brain. May 4, 2025

Egnor’s approach discourages us from expecting to learn too much from introspection.

Spacetime is not fundamental anyway?

The rest of Kuhn’s interview with Strawson is a great listen too: In particular, Strawson comments,

As you probably also know [8:52], there are a number of leading theoretical physicists who say that spacetime is not fundamental. So you think you see this spatial thing but you’re getting something radically wrong. So radically wrong that you have no right, as it were, to think that this stuff which you think of as spatial couldn’t just be consciousness.

That amounts to saying that we cannot take physicalism — physical things are the only reality — as the sure foundation of science unless we are prepared to allow physical things some aspect of what we now think of as non-physical, psychic reality.

This may be unsettling to some but we will doubtless be hearing more of it.

You may also wish to read: Has physics provided a new nail in the coffin of materialism? Cognitive scientists Donald Hoffman says that matter is now known not to be fundamental but that fact is taking a while to catch on. Continued failure to materialize the mind could be the beginning of a serious reckoning with the problems that physicalism and materialism represent.